BEELZEBUB O'BRIEN, K STREET WARRIOR

Name: BEELZEBUB O'BRIEN, K STREET WARRIOR
Author: Walter Carlin

by Walter Carlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2012

More screwball than satire, the amusement factor can’t raise the narrative from the weight of its too-familiar elements.

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In a town where everybody is for sale, how is an agent of hell supposed to corrupt anyone?

Carlin’s latest novel uses Washington, D.C.’s lobbyist scene as a backdrop for a broad religious satire that reserves its deepest cuts for American business-as-usual practices. Billy O’Brien is a South Dakota-raised MBA, who, despite experience in corporate America, is unprepared for his new lobbyist job at I.D.E.A., LLP, a shadowy lobbying firm with fingers in innumerable pies. Freshly promoted to K Street Warrior, essentially a glorified bag man for government bribes and payoffs, Billy gets killed in a traffic accident and is promptly sent to hell where he’s “adopted” by two mid-level bureaucrats and offered a golden opportunity. If he helps corrupt six uncorrupted souls, he can take part in an exchange program with heaven, basically a “get out of Hell free” card. Billy jumps at the chance, but when he meets Lisa, a beautiful woman possibly playing for the other side, his doubts start to mount. When he mysteriously returns to his old life, with new but familiar players in the game, will the better angels of Billy’s nature win out? Carlin displays a knack for dialogue and a superb sense of pacing, and his raging cynicism makes for several entertaining broadsides at recent developments, particularly the Supreme Court decision regarding political spending as speech. However, many points are made to the detriment of the story; the satire is extremely broad, and except for the touchingly inept Billy, whose naïveté protects him from being evil, the characters rarely register as anything other than types. Too much of the story veers into cliché, preventing the satirical elements from taking flight.

More screwball than satire, the amusement factor can’t raise the narrative from the weight of its too-familiar elements.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 312

Publisher: Kurti Publishing

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2011

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.